Here is a video of TED Talk by a Google engineer. It's of personal interest to me, since I've known this guy since he was about five years old. He's from Ashland, Oregon where I live and we are friends with his family. At any rate, he went to MIT and got a job at Google. Sergei Brim tasked him and his team with coming up with a new windmill design that costs half as much as anything on the market and be twice as efficient as anything out there.
The design looks like a cross between a kite and a glider doing rapid loop-the-loops. Propellers mounted on the contraption collect the wind energy. Since it's a like a kite and high in the air, it captures wind not normally at ground level no matter which way the wind blows. See [
www.youtube.com]
